Here’s a plant you don’t see every day in Pennsylvania.

False Indigo or Indigobush (Amorpha fruticosa) is a shrub-sized member of the legume family (Fabaceae) native to North America.  It normally occurs from south central Canada to northern Mexico but it’s cultivated for gardens and has escaped to the wild in New England and the Pacific Northwest.

Related to leadplant (Amorpha canescens), Illinois Wildflowers describes false indigo as “Leadplant on steroids.”

The escapees have caused problems.  False indigo is easy to grow and it tends to form dense thickets. Since each plant is 4-18 feet tall and even wider than tall, it’s a problem where it’s unwanted. Connecticut and Washington state have listed it as invasive.

The flowers are unusual for the pea family. The plant’s 3-8 inch racemes are covered in small purple or dark blue flowers with yellow anthers sticking out.  Unlike normal pea flowers false indigo’s have only one lip, hence the genus name for the plant: Amorpha, meaning formless or deformed.

Its common name is “false” indigo because it produces such a tiny amount of indigo pigment.

See a list of bees and moths that love false indigo and read more about it here on the Illinois Wildflowers website.

Dianne Machesney photographed it last weekend at Hillman State Park in Washington County, PA.  It would be a Life Plant for me.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

Summer is the time for itchy things, especially poison ivy.  Here’s a timely lesson about leaves.

Do you know how to recognize poison ivy?  Here’s what makes it different:

• Only 3 leaflets on the leaf stem. Never extra leaflets.
• Lower leaves are lopsided; outer edge is longer than inner edge.
• Leaves have notched edges, not saw-toothed.
• Center leaf has a long stem. Side leaves have no stems.
• No thorns at all.
• Grows either on the ground or as a climbing hairy vine (the “hairs” are rootlets).
• Its compound leaves are alternate on the main stem; noticeable on the vine. (The 3 leaflets make up a compound leaf.)

The slideshow below illustrates most of these characteristics.

On Throw Back Thursday: Learn more at this vintage article from 2009:  Look But Don’t Touch.

p.s. Most animals are immune to poison ivy.  Birds eat its berries. Deer eat the stems and leaves. Ladybugs and flies walk on it without any reaction!

(photos by Kate St. John)

The air smells sweet this weekend. Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) is in bloom.

Although it’s invasive, I always enjoy the smell and taste of honeysuckle nectar.  So do bees and moths who are naturally attracted to white flowers.

So why do honeysuckle flowers come in two colors, gold and white?

I decided to watch a bumblebee visit the flowers and see what happened. Though she had plenty of golden flowers to choose from she only sipped at the white ones (above).

Then I looked at the flowers.  Are the gold ones the old ones?

• The flowers at the tips of the branches (i.e. new growth) are white. The gold flowers are on the older parts of the vine.
• The buds are white just before they open.
• The faded flowers are always gold.
• I found a set of flowers (blooms in sets of 4, two on each side of the stem) where two of the four had been covered by leaves and were inaccessible to pollinators.  The visible flowers were gold, the inaccessible flowers where white.

So the white flowers are new and unfertilized, asking the bees to visit them. The gold flowers are old, already fertilized and beginning to fade.

Honeysuckle is color coded for bees.

p.s. Taste?   As a kid I learned to lick a drop of nectar by pulling off a single flower, pinching the stem-end and pulling the pistil out of the bottom.  The nectar beads up as the pistil emerges. Yum!  … I tested a golden flower: Did it still have nectar? yes.

(photos by Kate St. John)

UPDATE, June 8. 2018:  Further bolstering my pollinated-color theory, I found a flower turning yellow on the same stem with one white and one gold flower.